Quarterly Report: Incident Response trends from Q3 2021
Ransomware again dominated the threat landscape, while BEC grew By David Liebenberg and Caitlin Huey. Once again, ransomware was the most dominant threat observed in Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) engagements this quarter. CTIR helped resolve several significant ransomwa
SQUIRRELWAFFLE Leverages malspam to deliver Qakbot, Cobalt Strike
By Edmund Brumaghin, Mariano Graziano and Nick Mavis. Executive summary Recently, a new threat, referred to as "SQUIRRELWAFFLE" is being spread more widely via spam campaigns, infecting systems with a new malware loader. This is a malware family that's been spre
Threat Roundup for October 15 to October 22
Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Oct. 15 and Oct. 22. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting k
Malicious campaign uses a barrage of commodity RATs to target Afghanistan and India
* Cisco Talos recently discovered a threat actor using political and government-themed malicious domains to target entities in India and Afghanistan. * These attacks use dcRAT and QuasarRAT for Windows delivered via malicious documents exploiting CVE-2017-11882 — a memory corru
Threat Roundup for October 8 to October 15
Today, Talos is publishing a glimpse into the most prevalent threats we've observed between Oct. 8 and Oct. 15. As with previous roundups, this post isn't meant to be an in-depth analysis. Instead, this post will summarize the threats we've observed by highlighting ke
A wolf in sheep's clothing: Actors spread malware by leveraging trust in Amnesty International and fear of Pegasus
By Vitor Ventura and Arnaud Zobec. Threat actors are impersonating the group Amnesty International and promising to protect against the Pegasus spyware as part of a scheme to deliver malware. Amnesty International recently made international headlines when it released a groundb
Operation “Armor Piercer:” Targeted attacks in the Indian subcontinent using commercial RATs
By Asheer Malhotra, Vanja Svajcer and Justin Thattil. * Cisco Talos is tracking a campaign targeting government personnel in India using themes and tactics similar to APT36 (aka Mythic Leopard and Transparent Tribe). * This campaign distributes malicious documents and archive
Operation Layover: How we tracked an attack on the aviation industry to five years of compromise
By Tiago Pereira and Vitor Ventura. * Cisco Talos linked the recent aviation targeting campaigns to an actor who has been targeting the aviation industry for two years. * The same actor has been running successful malware campaigns for more than five years. * Although always
Translated: Talos' insights from the recently leaked Conti ransomware playbook
Executive summary Cisco Talos recently became aware of a leaked playbook that has been attributed to the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group Conti. Talos has a team of dedicated, native-level speakers that translated these documents in their entirety into English. We also transl